Who among us doesn’t love a good chart? I find them irresistible. Does that make me a dork? Probably. Does that make me a smarter, better-rounded person overall? Hopefully. My latest source for intense charts is The Upshot, a blog from the New York Times.I also happen to be fascinated by the economy, and this …
There are two topics that I’ve been hearing about frequently, and I’m fascinated by the different ways we’re handling them. The first is design as empathy, and the second is information overload. Susan Szenasy discussed both of these in her talk at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, on Friday, May 9. …
I’m not sure how I found out about them, but I’ve been aware of Poketo for a couple years now. I had the chance to go in December, and it was nothing short of a spiritual experience*. The store is perfect, it feels like it has all of the material things that a person needs …
I saw this project today, and I was fascinated by it. It’s called Not Granola, by Aaron Rappaport. It’s a Panton Chair. But it’s made out of grass and clay. Does that fundamentally change the nature of the chair? I know that there are physical differences between clay and plastic, and the way they feel …
[Ryan] Even if you’re doing what you love, it’s still work. Absolutely. I have a couple problems with the “do what you love” ideology. The first issue I have is that it is impossible for everyone to do what they love. As a society, we cannot function without people doing the dirty work: someone has to …
For me, cars were an entry point to design. Cars were around me, I could look at them whenever I wanted, and I made a weird habit of identifying all the cars around me, all the time, when I was fifteen or sixteen*. I grew up in Metro Detroit, too, so the presence of the …
I recently saw an exhibit at the DePaul Art Museum called The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus. It was surprising and informative — prior to seeing the exhibit, I knew that there was conflict in the area around Sochi, and that it was fairly economically depressed, but I didn’t know …
Left to right – John Berry, director of Design West Michigan, with Clive Owens. On Wednesday, February 5th, Design West Michigan hosted a lecture featuring Clive Owens, founder of Society for Experiential Graphic Design. It introduced me to something that I hadn’t known much about before – experiential design. Experiential design is the category of …
I saw this house tour the other day on Apartment Therapy, and I added it to the “tiny adorable homes that I am wholly in love with” collection. Ugh. So perfect. It makes me want to build a couple of tiny cabins in the woods and invite all the people who I like to come …
I’ve been seeing a lot of buzz lately about The Defining Decade, so I decided to read it. It was…alright. The thing that really bothered me throughout the book was the assumptions that the author made about the things that 20-somethings will want in the future. There’s this idea, that everyone wants to (or should …